World Newspaper Archive Reaches 2.5 Million Pages

The World Newspaper Archive, a partnership of CRL member libraries and Readex (a division of NewsBank), has reached a milestone of 2,500,000 scanned pages across the four available modules. Member investment in this successful collaborative digitization program has enabled CRL and Readex to make 300,000 issues from more than 200 newspapers widely available electronically. Some recent updates:

Latin American Newspapers, Series 2 (1822–1922)

As of October 2012, Latin American Newspapers, Series 2, contains over 80 titles, with nearly 58,000 issues. With 430,000 pages scanned to date, this represents approximately one-third of the total projected collection size of 1.2 million pages. Recently released content includes issues from such important Latin American titles as:

El Mundo (Havana, Cuba) [1911–1924] – one of the leading newspapers in early 20th century Havana

Universal (Caracas, Venezuela) [1911–1922] – one of the largest circulating dailies in the country

CRL has negotiated arrangements with a number of member institutions to include their rare newspaper holdings in this module, including the University of California, Berkeley; University of Florida; Harvard University; University of Texas at Austin; and Yale University. The latest partners committing to provide content include the University of Georgia, Indiana University, Tulane University, and the New York Public Library.

South Asian Newspapers (1864–1922)

South Asian Newspapers, launched in 2010, continues to add content to supplement its existing 430,000 pages. CRL and Readex have begun to incorporate non-English language titles in vernacular scripts. Although many South Asian scripts cannot be OCRed, page images from titles that include Bengali, Gujarati, and other scripts will be available for browsing. A significant addition to the module will be more than 2,500 issues of Amrita Bazar Patrika, a nationalist newspaper published in Calcutta. Early issues, never before accessible to U.S. scholars, were located and preserved by the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSSC).

Access for CRL Members

The WNA modules can be purchased by CRL institutions on favorable terms, scaled to each institution’s library materials expenditures, with minimal annual access fees. Member purchases provide funds to defray the costs of digitization. For more information on available content, visit CRL’s project page.